Tableau Certifications moving to Pearson
Monday, August 9th, 2021
The Tableau Specialist exam has been revised – instead of 30 questions with a mix of hands-on and knowledge based questions, it’s now 40 questions with no hands-on questions. In the past the Specialist exam would be taken on a virtual machine, but with the new version you don’t need to actually use Tableau so there’s no
Here’s the Tableau page with the announcement of the move to Pearson: https://www.tableau.com/tableau-certification-faq and here’s Pearson’s Tableau certification page: https://home.pearsonvue.com/tableau.
As soon as I saw the change, I scheduled to take the Specialist exam with Pearson. Technical difficulties! Even after turning off various filtering software and disabling Windows Defender, I could not get the Video Streaming test to pass. I tried on three different computers: my work laptop, my personal laptop, and my wife’s laptop… same result all three times. I even tried connecting at my friend’s place, but I kept getting this:

When I did the system check I could not get by this message. Making matters worse, the chat help was not responsive and I spent more than 15 minutes on hold with Pearson before giving up. I sent an email to the support team.
Update: The support team responded two days later they followed up with this link https://home.pearsonvue.com/op/OnVUE-technical-requirements. I retried the system test without changing anything on my setup this time my system passed. I also heard from a student who finally got the system test to pass. I strongly suspect the problem was on Pearson’s end:

Also, Tableau Professional Certification exam will be retired at the end of this month.
One new exam (probably advanced-level) will be announced this fall.
This is what I heard from one Tableau contact person:
“Our new exam will be a role-based exam geared toward the Data Analyst role. It will include competencies that are tested in both the Tableau Desktop Certified Associate and Desktop Professional exam, however maps more closely to the Desktop Certified Associate. If you are looking to achieve an advanced title, we recommend taking the Desktop Certified Professional exam while it is still available.”
Great info! Thank you Tony. I plan on taking it once it’s published.